Need for speed

What a cool tool Firebug is. It lets you get under the covers of web pages, to see what is going on. One feature is the ability to measure the page size and that of individual components on the page. This blog post comes in at 294kb. If I think back to the early days, that number would make me shiver. In the days of 56k dial up a page that size could take more than a minute to download. Things are different now. In the UK Broadband penetration is now greater than 72% (source [xls]) and the page appears almost instantaneously.

So do we still need to optimise our pages for size and speed of download? Having run hundreds of usability sessions, the key gripe of the web used to be speed – slow download times could effectively kill a proposition. But that’s not such an issue with a fat connection. Not unless it’s a hollywood movie you are downloading…

But what about the remaining 30% who still use dial-up – that is not an insignificant minority to exclude. I assume that people who read this blog are more likely to be using a fast connection, so I don’t feel I am excluding anyone there. But as large pages become acceptable, with rich content and streaming media, should we spare a thought for the dwindling dial-uppers?

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One of the key advantages of a desktop blog aggregator is that it helps solve these problems. Firstly you’re only downloading the articles, not the pages around them, and secondly they can hit a large number of sites while you’re busy reading the first (effectively pre-caching the next set of articles)

Of course, there’s an argument to be made that says that people who still have dial-up may not be the sort of people who have even heard of “desktop blog aggregators”….

That’s the latest ADSL availability map for BT. And that’s BT only – there are plenty of other providers.

Given that the current size of a few Amazon.co.uk and Ebay.co.uk pages I’ve just visited hovers around 180-300k, I wouldn’t be too worried. It’s also important to remember that the lag on those dial-up connections is SIGNIFICANTLY higher (mine used to be around 300-400ms when I was living not far away from the ISP, on a 56k modem). I’m not sure how to measure that in terms of actual perceived speed, but it certainly affected my Quake 2 fragging back in the day.

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Marc McNeill

For more than a decade Marc has been a passionate advocate of placing the customer at the heart of business, working with clients in finance, retail, government and entertainment sectors, helping them craft compelling cross channel customer experiences. Marc champions lean and agile approaches for making customer driven innovation happen. He co-authored the book Agile Experience Design. As a consultant with ThoughtWorks he brought design thinking and creativity to clients, engaging across their organisations with a focus on delivery as well as ideas. Today he is Customer Experience Director at Auto Trader. He has been known to dance and is rather partial to mangos.